December 12, 2007
Wednesday

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life —
what can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
                             — William Stafford, 1914-1993
                                  American poet

Things I have learned, for the first time or again, in these twenty-nine days:

• Although I am an introvert in the sense that I gather information and process it best in silence and alone, I need more face time with people and interaction in the world than I would have thought before. My production increased in amount and quality after I got the car. The trips to Buffalo and Story and Ten Sleep and Dayton, the church suppers and the chats with shopkeepers and librarians and other local folk and lunch with genuine cowboys at the Crazy Woman Saloon (yesterday) and contemplative nuns at a Benedictine abbey (that was today, half a mile from the Crazy Woman) opened me and gave me an energy that I brought back to the page.

• The page is not so frustrating and fearsome anymore. I am no longer afraid of writing the Shitty First Draft, nor am I afraid to let my characters go where they need to go. I am no longer afraid of revision, nor of long sidetrips down roads that might be dead ends.

• My writing is wilder and younger and more energetic than it was. This trip made me feel wilder and younger and more energetic than I was when I came to Wyoming for the first time two years ago. The work I produced on that trip was sedate, tame, restrained, a report, a travelogue. The work I produced this last month, the public material for this site, the fiction work, and even the private my-eyes-only stuff that poured out of me, has an energy that has surprised me.

• My spirituality, my connection to the cosmic and the divine, shapes and defines my process and my life more than I thought before. When I take the time to make a ceremony of the work, the work goes better and the demons that I struggle with are less rowdy.

• I am brave, independent, and capable, strong and loving and fearless. I know a lot of things about a lot of things, and I can’t wait to learn more. More people love me and care about me than I ever appreciated before. And I love and care for them in ways I am only now beginning to understand.

• I am not going to stop writing fiction. This time last year I thought I might, but now I know I won’t. This time last year I looked at my birthday coming up and told myself I had ten good years left, to write, to be, to become. I’m three months away from the end of the first of those ten years, and I think I still have ten left. 

• I will be in Wyoming again before 2009 is over. What began as a romantic 1950s schoolgirl interest in “the West” shaped entirely by Saturday morning television has grown into a wiser and more genuine love of this big, forward-moving place. And though I loved the high desert and the Wind River range that I visited first, it is the high plains and the Big Horns that I will return to.

Thanks to all who shared this journey with me, who read because I kept sending them links even if they hadn’t signed up for that, who read because the NaBloPoMo Randomizer landed them here or my link rode the top of the Holidailies or 3 Way Action portal for a while. Thank you to those who sent e-mails, left comments, sent me text messages, or called with drinking advice and weather reports and encouragement, who taped Friday Night Lights for me and didn’t send me spoilers, who said they missed me, who said they loved me.

Thank you for so much, so often.

Love it? Hate it? Just want to say Hi? Leave a comment, or e-mail me:
margaretdeangelis [at] gmail [dot] com (replace the brackets with @ and a period)